Politics|House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances

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House Democrats Demand Information From White House About Security Clearances

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Representative Elijah E. Cummings, the chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, demanded access to documents related to the Trump administration’s security clearance practices.CreditCreditErin Schaff/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — A powerful Democratic House committee chairman investigating possible abuses of the government’s security clearance process stepped up demands on Friday to see key documents and interview potential witnesses from the White House in light of a new report that President Trump personally intervened to grant his son-in-law a top-secret clearance despite legal and national security concerns.

The chairman, Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, who leads the House Oversight and Reform Committee, accused the White House in a new letter of stonewalling his requests for information and implied that if it did not comply voluntarily, he would issue a subpoena to compel its cooperation.

He said the report, published by The New York Times, added new concerns that Mr. Trump was lying to the public about his role in the clearance process to existing and broader questions about irregularities surrounding who should have access to sensitive government secrets.

“If true, these new reports raise grave questions about what derogatory information career officials obtained about Mr. Kushner to recommend denying him access to our nation’s most sensitive secrets,” Mr. Cummings wrote in a letter to Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel. The letter went on to ask about “why President Trump concealed his role in overruling that recommendation, why General Kelly and Mr. McGahn both felt compelled to document these actions, and why your office is continuing to withhold key documents and witnesses from this Committee.”

The report in The New York Times said that Mr. Trump’s intervention so concerned senior administration officials that John F. Kelly, then the White House chief of staff, documented the action in a contemporaneous internal memo that said he had been “ordered” to grant Mr. Kushner a top-secret clearance.

The Times also reported that Donald F. McGahn II, then the White House counsel, wrote a memo of his own documenting concerns raised by the C.I.A. and other officials about Mr. Kushner. Mr. McGahn, the memo noted, had recommended against giving him such broad access to the government’s secrets.

Mr. Trump told The Times in January in an Oval Office interview that he had no role in Mr. Kushner’s clearance.

Mr. Cummings has been pursuing reported irregularities by the White House and the Trump transition team since 2017, when Republicans were in control of the House. But he started a broad inquiry of his own last month after taking control of the oversight panel, Congress’s most muscular investigative body, which he said he hoped would shine light on any national security risks that may exist.

He has specifically requested information on the clearances of nine current and former administration officials, including Mr. Kushner. Among those whose clearances he intends to scrutinize are Mr. Trump’s current and former national security advisers, John R. Bolton and Michael T. Flynn; his onetime staff secretary, Rob Porter; a former senior director on the National Security Council, Robin Townley; a former deputy national security adviser, K. T. McFarland; as well as Sebastian Gorka, a former deputy assistant to the president.

Mr. Cummings has also asked for documents related to a review of the security clearance process that Mr. Kelly conducted in 2018 that concluded there were serious flaws in the system meant to vet high-level officials. And Mr. Cummings wants to talk to “all personnel in the White House Personnel Security Office.”

The White House, he said on Friday, has thus far not complied.

In a sign that House Democrats would seek to further elevate the issue in their oversight agenda, Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said on Thursday that his panel, responsible for overseeing American intelligence agencies, would work with Mr. Cummings’.

Mr. Schiff called Mr. Trump’s actions the “latest indicator of the president’s utter disregard for our national security and for the men and women who sacrifice so much every day to keep us safe.”